Me>> I would have thought it was the capacity of other cultures to outnumber
>>the hsunchen by means of agricultural technology in a given region (ten
>>farmers for every one hunter-gather is the ratio I've heard).
>Don't know where you've heard that. The density of Bronze Age
>hunter-gatherer societies in central and eastern europe was comparable to
>that of neighboring agricultural peoples, according to the anthropological
>evidence I've seen.
Bronze-age hunter gatherers in central and eastern Europe doesn't sound right to me. There was a wave of farmers that spread out over europe in that time and before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. I think you are speaking of pastoralists (like the scythians although they are Iron Age) who can attain a much higher population densities with their lifestyle and are more militarily effective. But all this is off the top of my head as I'm teaching a lab at the moment but I'll check my sources.
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